Dixie

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Native Mississippian journalist Curtis Wilkie presents a look at southern political and social history over the second half of the 20th century, using his own personal history as a framework. Wilkie covered many of the South's most seminal events, including 1964's Mississippi Freedom Summer, Jimmy Carter's campaign for the White House, the shift from the Democratic Party to the GOP, and the conviction of Byron De La Beckwith for the murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evans. There's no one more qualified to write about southern history than Wilkie.

Publishers Weekly

In this social chronicle of the American South's past 40 years, Wilkie (coauthor, Arkansas Mischief), a native Mississippian who exiled himself, proves that, indeed, you can't take the South out of the boy. Drawing on his own memories and dozens of books and magazine articles, Wilkie retells the big stories he covered as a journalist, most notably for the Boston Globe: Ole Miss's forced acceptance of its first black student in 1962; "Freedom Summer" of 1964, "the most terrible year of violence since the Civil War"; Nixon's Southern Strategy to wrestle the Southern vote from the Democrats; the election of Jimmy Carter; the conviction of Medgar Evers's murderer in 1994, 31 years after the crime. But at the core of this book is Wilkie's own development in the face of enormous changes. Raised as someone "who observed segregationist customs, but disapproved of blatant bigotry," Wilkie becomes appalled by the South's racism. In 1969, he flees Mississippi for the cultivated Northeast he'd read about in Cheever and Updike novels, planning never to return. Of course, he discovers New England has its own problems, like the controversial student busing program in 1975 Boston. After 25 years, Wilkie moves southward again and finds it, like himself, changed yet unchanged. "My generation experienced more disruption in our social order than any other.... Yet we maintained our own culture, our accent, our cuisine, our music as if should we give them up we would finally admit defeat." Wilkie's candid analyses and self-examination lift this book above a mere rehashing of the times. (Oct.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A fluent and fluid memoir of growing up way down south, from Boston Globe reporter Wilkie. As a poor white youth in 1940s and '50s Mississippi, as a college student at Ole Miss, and later still as a newspaperman with the Clarksdale Press Register, Wilkie was witness to an era of extraordinary change in the American South. When he was a kid, bigotry was the way of life-African-Americans were "mud people," Jews were "Babylonian Talmudists"-and Southerners held jealously to their culture, accent, music, and food. Widely stereotyped as a baroque lot living "as spiritual citizens of a nation that existed for only four years in another century" (and whose cult figures were a parade of eccentrics from Elvis to Bear Bryant), the federal government was about to give them a rude awakening via laws of desegregation. Wilkie lived through the thick of it-the rise of the Citizens Councils and the Klan, the coming of James Meredith, the sit-ins at Greensboro, the Freedom Riders-and he charts here how the sense of fairness inculcated in him by his mother evolved into an understanding of the injustice of segregation. Like many teenagers, he wanted to be a rebel, and it began to dawn on him that the true rebels were sitting at Woolworth lunch counters waiting vainly to be served. By the time Martin Luther King was shot in Memphis, Wilkie had witnessed enough and he fled north. He offers a beautifully nuanced reading of the Carter presidency, trumped up for its Southern roots, its decency, and its honor. When the Globe returned Wilkie to the South to cover the place like a foreign country for readers in that chilly northern town, he immediately sensed that major changes (in both mindset and demographics)had taken place since he left-changes that have been unfortunately obscured by the recent brouhaha over the Mississippi state flag. Wilkie is a savvy reporter, combining grace with tack-sharpness in this memorable portrait of a slice of the South over the past half-century.